About the Author:
Novelist, poet, essayist and social activist, Sarah E. Wright (1928-2009) was born in the Village of Wetipquin, on the Eastern Shore of Jim Crow Maryland. She helped organize the First and the Second National Conference of Black Writers and the Congress of American Writers. She was the president of Pen & Brush, Inc., the oldest professional organization of women in the United States, and a member of the Harlem Writer's Guild, PEN, the Authors Guild, and the International Women's Writing Guild. Wright received numerous awards, including two MacDowell Colony fellowships for creative writing, the 1975 CAPS Award for Fiction, the 1976 Howard University Novelist-Poet Award, the Middle Atlantic Writers Association Award, and the Zora Neale Hurston Award.
Wright's first book, Give Me a Child, coauthored by Lucy Smith, is a collection of poetry designed to make poetry accessible to the general public. Her first novel, This Child's Gonna Live was chosen by the New York Times as one of 1969's most important books and by the Baltimore Sun for the 1969 Readability Award. Her third book, A. Philip Randolph: Integration in the Workplace, was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the Best Books for Young Adults published in 1990.
Review:
Mariah and Jacob battle against grim and desperate poverty. One baby dies after her naval is bound with an unsterile bandage; later another dies from pneumonia, worms, and poison. Neighbors attack and gossip, hurling words in their own hopeless frustration at trying to make a living out of the used-up land and oyster beds of Tangierneck, Maryland: "wonder was that it hadn't all been washed away, the way that big, wide, bossy, ocean-going Nighaskin River keeps pouring water down into the mouth of the Neck until Deep Gut swallows all it can hold and backs the rest of it out for the ocean." It is a bleak and awful world, and Sarah Wright's language swirls up out of it, making the water, trees and buzzards seem sentient and symbolic. There is little hope and much determination, little forgiveness and far too many things to forgive in this place. The Paddy Rollers come around and lynch black men, the nearest school is still far away, and nothing seems to cure Mariah's children of their constant illnesses. Yet Mariah keeps on, dead set on getting her children out of the Neck, on finding a way out of a place without hope. Sarah Wright describes a horrible reality in stunning, beautiful, almost surreal language, creating a powerful novel that burns in your mind like the hallucinations of a fever. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister
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